I Was Naive When I First Woke Up

I was very naive when I first woke up.

I met a bunch of friends online (and then IRL) and believed I had finally met principled people who were simply after the truth.

I was so wrong.

Over the last 15 years I have seen many people claim to be libertarian, conservative, anarchist, voluntaryist, even radical leftists drop their principles when it became politically convenient.

The most common thing I see in this regard is being critical of an action when your enemy does it, and then celebrating it when "your side" does the EXACT same thing.

Case in point, I remember a time not too long ago when liberty minded people decried the use of Executive Orders and Presidents acting unilaterally to make changes. Even if those changes benefited "your cause".

I don't see this anymore.

I see "libertarians", "conservatives", and even "voluntaryists" cheering on the use of federal power as if they can not see how these same powers will be used by the "other team".

Wake TF up and have some consistency in your values and principles. Otherwise, you are just as bad as the people you bitch about, and you might as well be real and say "I just want to win, principles be damned".

History shows us how that works out. It doesn't. Not for individual liberty anyway.

In closing, I am reminded of the words of one of my biggest inspirations, Samuel Edward Konkin III. Konkin was the founder of Agorism (which inspired my Exit and Build strategy), and was a advocate for remaining principled in our fight for a better world. Whether or not the word “libertarian” appeals to you, this quote from his book The New Libertarian Manifesto always stays with me:

The basic principle which leads a libertarian from statism to a free society is the same that the founders of libertarianism used to discover the theory itself. That principle is consistency. Thus, the consistent application of the theory of libertarianism to every action the individual libertarian takes creates the libertarian society.

And to hammer the point home a little further:

”Many thinkers have expressed the need for consistency between means and ends and not all were libertarians. Ironically, many statists have claimed inconsistency between laudable ends and contemptible means; yet when their true ends of greater power and oppression were understood, their means are found to be quite consistent. It is part of the statist mystique to confuse the necessity of ends–means consistency; it is thus the most crucial activity of the libertarian theorist to expose inconsistencies. Many theorists have done so admirably; but few have attempted and most failed to describe the consistent means and ends combination of libertarianism”

The point he was making then and I am making now is that we cannot hope to achieve an actual liberated society if we play the statist game and muddy ourselves in actions which are less than principled. We must apply the principles of self-ownership, individual liberty, decentralization, localization, and mutual aid if we want to see a world which represents these values. I know I do. So I commit my life to being an example of this and calling out inconsistencies where I see them.